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There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point.

Charles Horton Cooley

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Charles Horton Cooley
Age: 64 †
Born: 1864
Born: August 17
Died: 1929
Died: May 27
Economist
Sociologist
Ann Arbor
Michigan
Charles Horton Cooley
Surface
Particular
Point
Way
Life
Earnestly
Penetrate
Attacking

More quotes by Charles Horton Cooley

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The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own.
Charles Horton Cooley
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Form the habit of making decisions when your spirit is fresh...to let dark moods lead is like choosing cowards to command armies.
Charles Horton Cooley
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The passion of self-aggrandizement is persistent but plastic it will never disappear from a vigorous mind, but may become morally higher by attaching itself to a larger conception of what constitutes the self.
Charles Horton Cooley
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Each man must have his I it is more necessary to him than bread and if he does not find scope for it within the existing institutions he will be likely to make trouble.
Charles Horton Cooley
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I is a militant social tendency, working to hold and enlarge its place in the general current of tendencies. So far as it can it waxes, as all life does. To think of it as apart from society is a palpable absurdity of which no one could be guilty who really saw it as a fact of life.
Charles Horton Cooley
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The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds.
Charles Horton Cooley
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The mind is not a hermit's cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse.
Charles Horton Cooley
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A person of definite character and purpose who comprehends our way of thought is sure to exert power over us. He cannot altogether be resisted because, if he understands us, he can make us understand him, through the word, the look, or other symbol.
Charles Horton Cooley
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The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.
Charles Horton Cooley
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One of the great reasons for the popularity of strikes is that they give the suppressed self a sense of power. For once the human tool knows itself a man, able to stand up and speak a word or strike a blow.
Charles Horton Cooley
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Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.
Charles Horton Cooley
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If love closes, the self contracts and hardens: the mind having nothing else to occupy its attention and give it that change and renewal it requires, busies itself more and more with self-feeling, which takes on narrow and disgusting forms, like avarice, arrogance and fatuity.
Charles Horton Cooley
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Unless a capacity for thinking be accompanied by a capacity for action, a superior mind exists in torture.
Charles Horton Cooley
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If we divine a discrepancy between a man's words and his character, the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful he revolts the imagination by his lack of unity, and even the good in him is hardly accepted.
Charles Horton Cooley
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By recognizing a favorable opinion of yourself, and taking pleasure in it, you in a measure give yourself and your peace of mind into the keeping of another, of whose attitude you can never be certain. You have a new source of doubt and apprehension.
Charles Horton Cooley
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To persuade is more trouble than to dominate, and the powerful seldom take this trouble if they can avoid it.
Charles Horton Cooley
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The chief misery of the decline of the faculties, and a main cause of the irritability that often goes with it, is evidently the isolation, the lack of customary appreciation and influence, which only the rarest tact and thoughtfulness on the part of others can alleviate.
Charles Horton Cooley
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We are ashamed to seem evasive in the presence of a straightforward man, cowardly in the presence of a brave one, gross in the eyes of a refined one, and so on. We always imagine, and in imagining share, the judgments of the other mind.
Charles Horton Cooley
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Kindliness seems to exist primarily as an animal instinct, so deeply rooted that mental degeneracy, which works from the top down,does not destroy it until the mind sinks to the lower grades of idiocy.
Charles Horton Cooley
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The actual God of many Americans... is simply the current of American life.
Charles Horton Cooley